In a hospital or clinic setting, the use of endoscopes and related equipment is very common, both during surgical (therapeutic) procedures and for diagnostic purposes. Disclosed herein is a sophisticated tracking tool allowing endoscopy suites to trace in real-time numerous useful parameters/information in the daily processing cycle within an endoscopy suite, such as equipment movement (i.e. where is each piece of equipment current located, where is it scheduled to be), equipment cleaning procedures, equipment repair and maintenance procedures, equipment status (i.e. is the equipment currently being used for a medical procedure, is it being cleaned or repaired), how often equipment is in use, how frequently certain equipment has to be repaired or is offline, repair spending for each piece of equipment, overall repair/spending patterns and the people who have been responsible for processing of or who have otherwise come into contact with each piece of equipment (technicians, medical staff and/or patients). This information tracking functionality can be utilized in conjunction with a scheduling function for scheduling, for example, patients, endoscopy equipment and an available operating room. Although the disclosed system is discussed herein with reference to endoscope suites and endoscopy-related equipment, it should be appreciated that the system may readily be adapted and used for other types of medical equipment, particularly in those instances where traceability of equipment is of concern. The disclosed system seeks to automate a number of current manual processes, and by doing so, can effect time savings, cost efficiencies, and improvements in the level of safety and patient care. The disclosed system integrates and ties together the various daily operations of the endoscopy suite, such as the cleaning procedures, repair and maintenance procedures and patient scheduling. Currently, there are no systems that provide such integration. Further, the system does not require that all the endoscope equipment being managed be made by the same manufacturer; the system can concurrently manage multiple makes and models of endoscopy equipment together, as well as any equipment on loan or consignment from vendors.
In addition to tracking endoscopes the system incorporates a module that enhances infection control through monitoring the automated endoscope reprocessors (AERs) which are used to clean the endoscope equipment. This includes tracking the required maintenance and testing of the equipment to ensure they are meeting efficacy requirements needed to guarantee the effective cleaning of the endoscopes.
The disclosed system further is readily scalable and allows for multi-site operations to be managed from a central location thus enabling effective use of all resources (management, inventory use) across the multiple sites.
A prior art system is known which allows users to keep track of the number of times an endoscope has been used by means of a counter; however, this has rather limited application and does not provide the level of sophistication of the disclosed system. This prior art system is very primitive and only counts, when the endoscope is plugged in, how many times it is used. It is a manual system for which the “counter” can only be viewed on the particular endoscope when it is in use (by manually triggering a function command). Information is only accessible to the one individual actually using the endoscope and only when such endoscope is in use (i.e.: it has to be manually plugged in). In contrast, the disclosed system is a real-time, Internet/web-based system, enabling up-to-date information to be viewed from any location at any time. The disclosed system tracks, among other things, the actual amount of time an endoscope is used (not just how often). Prior art endoscope systems are also known which incorporate a scheduling function; however, these are focused on facilitating the medical procedures, particularly from the perspective of the doctors using the endoscope. This does not provide the broad functionality of the disclosed system, nor the endoscope-centric focus. These scheduling systems require users to manually enter the start and end of the procedure and only record when an endoscope is in use in the procedure. In contrast, the disclosed system tracks an endoscope throughout the entire processing cycle; it only requires a user at each stage to scan an endoscope in order for the relevant information to be automatically populated and for the endoscope to be moved to the next step in the process. The scheduler is automatically transitioned to the next applicable stage (e.g. typical stages/status are “scheduled” (coded red colour), “started” (coded blue colour), or “completed” (coded green colour)).